"A Good Scent..."

Robert Butler combines two narratives in "A Good Scent...", one involving the narrator's family, and the other involving his long-time friend, Ho Chi Minh. The narrator, Dao, is living out his last days with his family often visiting him. He describes the Vietnamese lifestyle of family togetherness as "many paper lanterns around a village square" (237). On one particular day, Dao's son-in-law, grandson, and two daughters visit him. Thang and Loi exchange secretive words about the murder of a Vietnamese writer, who was shot dead by anti-Communists. Dao soon realizes that Thang and Loi might have had some involvement in the crime, or committed it themselves. Meanwhile, the story shifts a few times as Dao explains the encounters he has with Ho Chi Minh. Ho "did not appear as he was when I'd known him but as he was when he'd died" (235). Ho is distracted, pacing the room and looking at his hands covered in sweet smelling sugar. The two friends discuss the path each had taken, Dao returning to a religious life in search of harmony, and Ho becoming a revolutionary and political hero in Vietnam.
A recurring theme in the story is smell. Dao can sense Ho's arrival by the sweet smell of glaze. This smell inspires other memories of Dao's life, the birth of his first son, his wife, and working i France with Ho. It also triggers the unpleasant sour smell of Loi when he was a child. There is a clear contrast of smells to signal the contrast between the people in Dao's life. Dao constantly begins thinking of those that he wants to see in his afterlife and believes his life is coming to an end.
Overall, the story discusses the past and future of Vietnam, and the continued struggles that some Vietnamese possess. The politics still exist within the minds of the Vietnamese who have moved to the United States, as shown in Thang and Loi's presumed actions. Dao wishes for harmony but is troubled by what he learned about Thang and Loi. Dao tells of how in his younger days he was called by his past to become more religious, while Ho "was being called not from his past but from his future" (240). He also tells Dao that in his afterlife, there are no countries but he is not at peace. Although Ho prevailed in his attempts to unite Vietnam as a Communist nation, he is distraught at the number of his people who died at the hands of the United States in the Vietnam War. Through these two narratives, the author illustrates the effect that the war had and continues to have on many people.